I am currently a college student in Texas and there is a service at my school library called Illiad with which you can request pretty much any book you want from any library in the country and have it mailed to your school. You get to keep it for about a month. All you really need to know (for my school at least) is the title, author, and date of publication. I can only imagine every university has a program like this. Unfortunately most students don't know about them. Who knows, maybe even city libraries have interlibrary loan programs for their patrons. If you are a broke college student who can't afford cookbooks you should use this service. If you can afford cookbooks you should support vegan and vegetarian authors seeing that their market share in the cookbook game is about the size of a cat's paw. I hope you find this useful.

P.S. I had the good fortune of receiving one of the oldest cookbooks in existence through this program that was written in Baghdad a thousand years ago and costs a couple hundred dollars in the store if you can even find it. Thanks modern library system!

The problem with [public] library ILL is that some libraries find themselves loaning out more than their patrons ever borrow. It becomes a budget suck as it's sort of labor intensive. Some libraries have dropped out of the ILL system because of that. Other libraries charge a fee to borrow their books.

My library loans out books but we will not deal in audiobooks or DVD's for ILL.

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Wow, they let you loan out any book? Crazy! Here it would only be 4th year honours students and post-grads, and even then you'd have to get your request approved by your dissertation supervisor (therefore no cookbooks unless maybe your degree was... about cookbooks.) I don't think the public libraries would do it outwith in-city requests.

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I am currently a college student in Texas and there is a service at my school library called Illiad with which you can request pretty much any book you want from any library in the country and have it mailed to your school. You get to keep it for about a month. All you really need to know (for my school at least) is the title, author, and date of publication. I can only imagine every university has a program like this. Unfortunately most students don't know about them. Who knows, maybe even city libraries have interlibrary loan programs for their patrons. If you are a broke college student who can't afford cookbooks you should use this service. If you can afford cookbooks you should support vegan and vegetarian authors seeing that their market share in the cookbook game is about the size of a cat's paw. I hope you find this useful.

P.S. I had the good fortune of receiving one of the oldest cookbooks in existence through this program that was written in Baghdad a thousand years ago and costs a couple hundred dollars in the store if you can even find it. Thanks modern library system!

As a Texas resident (or student), you can also get a library card to most public and university libraries in the state. It's called Tex Share if you're interested.

Wow, they let you loan out any book? Crazy! Here it would only be 4th year honours students and post-grads, and even then you'd have to get your request approved by your dissertation supervisor (therefore no cookbooks unless maybe your degree was... about cookbooks.) I don't think the public libraries would do it outwith in-city requests.

When I was a postgrad in the UK, we were given fifty pounds worth of interlibrary loan vouchers per year (and interlibrary loans were charged at a pound each, so fifty requests a year). It was expected that we were using those for our research, but no one was checking.

buckabucka wrote:

Who knows, maybe even city libraries have interlibrary loan programs for their patrons.

Most public libraries in the US will do some sort of interlibrary loan. Whether you get charged for it or not, though, varies considerably. Our library system used to do all ILLs for free, and if the lending library charged, our library would just eat the cost. With budget cuts, we now pass the charge on to the patron. Fortunately, we have a fair few libraries with which we have an agreement to fill each others requests for free, so a lot of material is still available without charge.

Our library system here is very good about processing ILLs, but other libraries I've used as a patron haven't always been as helpful and may give you a bit of a runaround. But it's worth inquiring about. I was surprised, for example, to find out that, through my old public library in California, I could request books for free from any of a couple dozen university libraries, which was a lifesaver when I was finishing up the last bits of my dissertation.

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My uni did this, but again only for postgrads. But of course, I chose a ridiculously obscure thesis topic and never used the service because there were no relevant books available. I wish I'd thought to try using it for cookbooks!

I did this all the time when I worked in ILL because I was valuable and important, but a lot of university libraries are only supposed to do ILL for school-related items. Of course, they don't always know what's personal vs. school related, but we often questioned people that were ordering a lot if they could provide documentation from a professor proving that it was a legit need. So look into your rules before ordering.

When I left there was a guy ordering new comedy DVDs every day. He was about to receive an inquistive email!

Fortunately, my lame little suburban library will get me pretty much anything through ILL. I'd be quite frustrated if I were restricted to the books my library actually carries. Back when we did the cook book challenge, I got a lot of the books that I don't own through ILL, and was even convinced that I need to buy a few of them to have around all the time!

My university library does this. I think I've gotten everything I've every requested. I don't know if I'd ever do it for cookbooks though because it seems like it's a huge hassle for the people who work there and I can only justify it if I need the book for a paper. I always like to look and see what school the books came from but usually it's just Baylor or UT Austin. I don't think I've ever gotten any from out of state.

My local library does it too but there's a $2 charge for each book and half the time they can't even get the books so it's a hassle.

That is great that you can borrow from anywhere. I can borrow anything from within my county and from one county over, but that's about it. If it's from the other county, I can't renew it, which took me a few times to learn, but now I know if I get something from RCL I have to be quick with it. I did not take advantage of ILL when I was in school, which is a shame considering I worked in the library for 3 of my 4 years. Maybe I didn't want to deal with the crassholes in that dept? Once, I did recall all of my prof's books shortly before dropping her class. She was so peased.

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